ADOI Blog

Transparency. Not if it’s your sarong baby

mackattack on 05 23, 2008

by MAC ATTACK

So everyone wants to be transparent nowadays. The government wants transparency, the Rakyat demands transparency and all public officials are yapping about transparency. It’s even afflicted the mouths of your average ad-man, with calls for awards to be more transparent, and such.

When politicians start rattling a word, you know he’s got a cop-out clause somewhere in his sleeves. With all this talk of transparency, admen have started to catch the fever as well. In terms of digital media, we have talk of engaging the customers through the web in a transparent manner.
The missing issue here is: are you dealing with your customers with their genuine interest at heart, or merely just shipping out more sales – or staying in office longer – depending on what you are being transparent about.

Wikipedia quotes:
“as used in the humanities, implies openness, communication, and accountability. It is a metaphorical extension of the meaning used in the physical sciences: a “transparent” object is one that can be seen through. Transparency is introduced as a means of holding public officials accountable and fighting corruption. When government meetings are open to the press and the public, when budgets and financial statements may be reviewed by anyone, when laws, rules and decisions are open to discussion, they are seen as transparent and there is less opportunity for the authorities to abuse the system in their own interest.”

This means that in the transparency has to work for the stakeholders, not against them. Sadly, too many people seem to be using transparency for their own goals. They want their nemesis to wear a small, transparent sarong, so they can scream how dirty his crotch is. Funny thing is that when transparency is reversed, it can also bite back.

Engaging your customers in the digital media requires more than transparency. It requires a form of realness that might be foreign to a lot of marketing people who were thought that the product is king – despite that artwork behind the desk which states that the customer is king, placed there for the benefit of the customer.

If advertising can find a way to do this, being genuine as opposed to a media represented salesman, it would be one hell of a campaign. Sadly, while transparency seems abundant, its authenticity may be lacking.
Recent ‘transparent’ media statements:

“Charge me, I want my day in court,” says an ex-PM.

“Pom, pom, pom,” says an infamous lawyer.

“You need strong leadership as the profile of the Malaysian population has changed,” says our International Trade & Industry Minister.

Of course, in their zeal to be transparent, three national dailies have fallen over each other for a scoop by releasing the Lingam report way beyond its embargoed date, and the PM’s Legal Affairs Dept has lodged police reports against them.

The secret, I believe is being genuinely interested in the consequences of your action, and trying to make that consequence as positive as possible for people who are affected by them. Here at the Adoi Blog, we ask that you expect transparency from us, just not from our sarongs.

Or the ballot box.

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